


Coffee Shop Not-AU

by aeternamente



Series: Coffee, Tea, and You and Me [1]
Category: Kissing in the Rain (Web Series)
Genre: Coffee Shops, F/M, Starbucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-12
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-15 10:46:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1302061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeternamente/pseuds/aeternamente
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chapter 1 ("Anything Else?") was written for the Kissing in the Rain fan-canon experiment, and officially canonized by Shipwrecked Comedy!</p><p>I've decided to continue writing drabbles <strike>with Lily as a barista</strike> involving Lily and James and coffee shops every Monday, once the new episode of KitR has aired. These may or may not be canonized or canonballed by Shipwrecked Comedy, but either way, they will be posted here. If not canonized, the chapter title will be marked as AU (because I enjoy the irony of that).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Anything Else?

Working at Starbucks to support yourself in your acting career is one thing. Working at Starbucks to support yourself in your acting career, and seeing your co-star (who is really the most gigantic dick, and how do you end up with super-fantastic on-screen chemistry with a gigantic dick is what you want to know) “unexpectedly” walk in to get a grande half-caf hazelnut mocha is… something else entirely.

"Imagine meeting you here!" he says with a nervous laugh. "What a coincidence!"

Ugh, he’s such a bad actor! Except he’s a good actor when he’s actually acting. Yeah, you still haven’t figured that one out. You nod with a strained smile. “Aaanything else?” You’re determined to keep your side of the conversation on the subject of the transaction. Small talk just keeps him here longer, and God, you would really rather have him anywhere but here.

"Uhhh, yeah. Yeah, could I have…" He takes his sweet time surveying the baked goods behind the glass. "Could I have a slice of pound cake?"

You were  _going_  to keep your side of the conversation on the subject of the transaction, you really were, but you just can’t resist this one sarcastic jab:

"I thought you hated food."


	2. Losing Another Inch of Faith in Humanity (AU)

Subject: Publicity Outing  
From: lilypadrama@hotmail.com  
To: jamestheporter@gmail.com

> Okay, let’s get this over with. Where do you want to meet?
> 
> -Lily

Subject: Re: Publicity Outing  
From: jamestheporter@gmail.com  
To: lilypadrama@hotmail.com

> I’m not too particular. Except I’m gluten- and lactose-intolerant and I’m allergic to eggs, tomatoes and peanuts.
> 
> I look forward to seeing you again, Lily!
> 
> James
> 
> P.S.: Do you seriously still use Hotmail?

Subject: Re: Publicity Outing  
From: lilypadrama@hotmail.com  
To: jamestheporter@gmail.com

> Sounds like you would know better than I would what places have food you can eat. Why don’t you choose?
> 
> -Lily
> 
> PS: Lots of people use Hotmail. And let’s not pretend we’re looking forward to this.

Subject: Re: Publicity Outing  
From: jamestheporter@gmail.com  
To: lilypadrama@hotmail.com

> But I really am looking forward to seeing you!
> 
> How about the Coffee Bean across from the Starbucks where you work?
> 
> James
> 
> P.S.: I know that lots of people use Hotmail. Actually it’s kinda cute. It’s retro. ;)

Subject: Re: Publicity Outing  
From: lilypadrama@hotmail.com  
To: jamestheporter@gmail.com

> I don’t work there anymore, but yeah that Coffee Bean is fine. How about 2pm tomorrow?
> 
> -Lily
> 
> PS: Retro? What does that even mean?

Subject: Re: Publicity Outing  
From: jamestheporter@gmail.com  
To: lilypadrama@hotmail.com

> Great! I’ll see you then! :)
> 
> James
> 
> P.S.: Forget I said retro. Bad word choice. Vintage?

(End of email exchange.)


	3. Different (AU)

It’s different this time. For one thing, she knows he’s there because she  _sees_  him, not because he’s asked some inane question or made an awkward attempt at small talk. She’s placing her order for café au lait while scanning the coffee shop’s list of gluten-free baked goods (they have a decent selection, which is why she comes here) when he comes in from the back entrance. He catches her eye for a moment, but offers no greeting. He just looks down and shuffles into place in line behind her.

Lily’s mind goes into overdrive. She knows that the Jily shippers—who had subsided into relative hibernation as the excitement surrounding  _Anne of Green Gables_  began to die down following the films release on DVD—are now beginning to awaken to the news that Lily and James have been cast as romantic leads in a film  _for the third time_. The #jily tag is beginning to build up to what promises to be another sizable trend on twitter.

And now here they are. Lily and James. In a coffee shop. What is it with them and coffee shops anyway? It’s like a bad fanfic.

Lily pushes the idea out of her head and considers her options. She has already ordered her coffee in a mug, so she can’t pretend it was a to-go order and make an escape. A quick scan of the room confirms her suspicions that there is at least one photographer here, and he has  _noticed_. And Lily knows that if James asks her to sit with him, or (even worse) if he just sits himself down at her table uninvited, she can’t refuse or make a fuss. She knows what will happen then—there will be reports of “trouble in paradise” and Lily will be held responsible. She will have broken his heart and the fans will turn on her faster than you can say “misogynistic double-standard.”

A quote from Catching Fire springs to mind—Haymitch Abernathy saying, _"You’ll never, ever be able to do anything but live happily ever after with that boy."_  And yeah, it’s dramatic to compare her life to a YA distopia, but drama is her job after all, and she’s good at it.

"Did you want anything else, ma’am?" the barista asks.

Lily blinks. She was so absorbed in deciding what to do about the James situation, she forgot she hadn’t finished her order.

"Yes," she says pointedly. "A gluten-free tomato basil bagel.  _Extra_  cream cheese.” She makes sure to say it distinctly enough that James will hear it behind her. He hasn’t said anything yet, but she’s just annoyed with the whole situation and it gives her a strange savage pleasure to order things she knows he can’t eat.

She leaves the counter with her order as James waffles over what drink to buy, but she doesn’t spare him a backward glance. Instead, she chooses an empty table as far away from the photographer as possible and awaits James’s inevitable approach while slathering her bagel with a liberal layer of cream cheese.

But he never comes.

After finishing half her coffee and bagel, she allows herself a glance upward. He has seated himself across the room from her and is staring morosely into his own mug of coffee. In spite of all she had just done to avoid interaction—in spite of the cameras that are undoubtedly catching everything right now—he looks so pitiful that she has to fight an urge to get up and join him anyway. She looks down at the other half of her bagel and suddenly remembers that she doesn’t even really like the taste of dried tomatoes. The idea of them always sounds nice, but there’s something about them that just tastes weird to her.

She sips slowly at the rest of her coffee while trying not to sneak any more glances James-ward. It’s different this time. He’s different. And (she’s starting to realize) so is she.


	4. Things that Lily Did Not Do (AU)

Lily didn’t become more of a regular at the Coffee Loft just because she knew James went there a lot. Definitely not. She did have some self-respect after all, and the Coffee Loft was one of the few places in town that had (a) coffee she liked and (b) plenty of gluten-free food choices. So it wasn’t like it was a surprise that both of them would come here often.

She did not go there hoping she might see him, or maybe have a chance to explain or apologize, maybe talk about the weather. That would be ridiculous. And she definitely didn’t feel a dull sinking in her chest when she went there and didn’t see him. Her eyes didn’t dart toward the door every time it opened, and her breath did not catch in her throat whenever an entering customer was tall or had messy dark hair.

On the off-chance that James did make an appearance, her stomach did not explode into flutters and sparks, and she didn’t accidentally drop the bit of cranberry-walnut scone she held in her fingers, and there wasn’t any intense internal debate going on inside her as to whether she should wave or try to approach him. Of course not. She was just here to drink her coffee and eat her scone, and interactions with once-talkative but suddenly-inscrutable co-stars were not on the agenda.

As she walked toward the door, she did not strain her ears to pick up his side of an animated phone conversation with some unknown friend, and she certainly didn’t need to fight back a smile when she heard him laugh and say, “Oh, that’s just turtles all the way down!” (pause) “TURTLES, I SAY.”

And as she walked down the street toward her apartment, her mirth didn’t sour in her mouth into any growing sense of guilt over how completely she had misjudged him.

And when she reached her apartment and collapsed onto her couch, she definitely didn’t cry over missed chances and sudden changes of heart that came too late.


	5. The Logistics of Not Caring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic has been canonized!

The Coffee Loft was so named for the fact that it had an upper story with a balcony that looked down over the ground floor, accessible by a narrow, tightly winding spiral staircase. For months, James hadn’t ventured into the loft for the simple reason that there was usually a table open on the ground floor.

But a particularly busy afternoon had once sent him up there in search of a place to sit, and pretty soon, he found he liked it there. It was quieter—a tacit rule dictated that this was an area designated for reading or studying or just thinking your thoughts while staring into your coffee, and sometimes, this was just the atmosphere James needed. It could be a treacherous undertaking to scale the staircase with a brimming mug of hot coffee, but for James, it was worth it. He often came here to read or memorize scripts or to do character research or to catch up on emails.

He was, of course, also aware that Lily frequented the Coffee Loft as well. As a part of their complicated and unspoken truce, they never spoke to one another when they happened to visit at the same time, and always, always took tables a good distance away from one another. Before James had migrated up to the loft, they sat on opposite ends of the room. (And in fact, on the day he first visited the loft, it wasn’t because there were no free tables on the ground floor, it was because the only free tables were too close to Lily.) Now, their territory was more easily defined, and separated by a slightly rickety staircase.

It was too bad, James mused, because he got the feeling that Lily would like it up here.

_No. Stop,_  he admonished himself.  _I don’t care about her._

He often said this to himself when he found his thoughts straying toward treating Lily with too much familiarity, and what he meant by it was this: Lily was not Sirius or Ellen or Annie. He didn’t interact with her on a regular basis. He didn’t know her favorite color, or her favorite season, or how she spent a Friday evening. Gut feelings aside, he didn’t know if she  _would_  like it up here, because he didn’t know  _her_ , and any time he thought he understood and cared for her, what he really understood and cared for was a fictional Lily he’d made up in his head, not the real Lily sitting at a table several feet below him, absently stirring her coffee even though the half packet of sugar she’d poured in would have been fully dissolved about a minute ago. _  
_

That’s what he’d meant when he’d said it to her face yesterday: “I don’t care about you.” Of course, it came out wrong. Words always come out wrong with him, particularly where Lily was concerned, but perhaps at this point, it was better if he didn’t try anymore. Because if he did try to get to know her, he didn’t trust himself to know if the person he was getting to know was actually Lily, or if it was Anne or Olivia or Susan… or someone else entirely.


	6. Things Nobody Noticed (AU)

The Coffee Loft had a large and widely varying patronage, from corporate types from the office building down the street carefully dressed in their business best, to students at a nearby university sporting college casual and toting books and laptops and ambitions of making headway on their homework, to actors at every stage of their career (Meryl Streep had been known to stop by on occasion).

Perhaps that was why nobody really noticed when James Porter no longer occupied his habitual table by the balcony on the second story of the cafe (known as “the loft”). Either that, or it might have been the fact that James was currently between spikes in popularity. It had been about a year since the premiere of  _Smith and Jones_ , his last big success, and his next project (which he had just finished filming) was not due to premiere for a few months yet, so people weren’t paying much attention to him just now.

Neither were they paying much attention to his “perpetual co-star,” still inhabiting her usual table in the ground floor. Nobody noticed the way her eyes flickered up toward the loft and across the room toward the door, the way her coffee went cold as she sat, seeming to wait for something, never seeming to find it.

Nobody noticed when, a few weeks before the premiere, she stopped coming too.

It was a bad year for the phenomenon known as Jily shipping. Sure, it enjoyed a spike around the premiere of _Let's Say We Did_ , particularly given the suspected couple’s behavior at the premiere party, which one magazine called, “startlingly intimate, and not even trying to hide it.” But following that, there was enough of a drought of any interaction at all between the two actors that even those who held out for a secret relationship hidden from the press were beginning to get bored.

So nobody knew about the next Jily film that was not to be.

Nobody knew that, the day after Lily indicated to her agent that she was interested in the film, she went to the Coffee Loft, ordered a coffee and an autumn squash bisque, and took it up to the loft, where she waited until both coffee and soup were cold, then left, feeling like an idiot and intending never to come back.

And nobody knew that, the day after James turned down the role, he went to the Coffee Loft, ordered a soy chai latte and gluten-free poppy seed bagel, and chose a table on the ground floor, where he waited until both chai and bagel were cold, then left, also feeling like an idiot and intending never to come back.


	7. The Loft (AU)

Some time ago, Lily had come to associate her visits to the Coffee Loft with this weird jumble of dread and anticipation that felt like someone had tried to conduct electricity through a glob of molasses in the pit of her stomach. There were times, particularly while shooting their last film together, that she had convinced herself that  _this_  time, if she saw him sitting up in the loft when she came in, she would, immediately after getting her coffee, march up there and…

…well she wasn’t clear on  _what_  she would do, but marching up there in itself would be something.

One of these times, he hadn’t been there when she came in, but had made an appearance midway through her visit. After an intense internal debate, she’d decided it would be weird to go up there when she’d already settled in with her coffee at her usual table.

Another of these times, she came in and he was already there, and she stood in line repeating to herself the mantra,  _I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it, I’m really seriously going to do it_ , then forgot nearly everything about the process of placing an order, from how she took her coffee to digging her punch card out of her wallet to stepping aside for the person in line behind her. After picking up her order, she stood for nearly a minute contemplating the stairs to the loft, until a small splash down her front made her realize her hand was shaking.

And then the idea of facing him wearing a coffee-stained dress (that would only get more stained in the process of navigating the stairs) seemed too much for her, and she took her order to her usual table, all the while calling herself an idiot and a coward and every other insult she could think of.

She remembered all of these feelings now as she entered the familiar coffee shop yet again, but they felt so far removed from the dizzy, sunny elation that filled her to bursting now. She walked in the door, and didn’t even try to hide the fact that the first place her eyes went was up to the balcony.

And there he was.

He saw her immediately and shot her a grin, which she returned so enthusiastically, she was afraid she was about to break something in her face. She floated through her order (once again forgetting about her punch card), and had no sooner picked up her coffee than she spilled a little of it on her dress. She rolled her eyes at herself, but didn’t really care.

She scaled the staircase and sat down at his table with a smile (or rather, a broadening of the smile that was already plastered over her face). He didn’t mention the coffee stain, and in fact, didn’t say anything at all beyond a soft greeting. He’d already warned her about the quiet atmosphere people liked to maintain up in the loft. But they had talked plenty last night at his place, and now it was so nice to just sit together in contented silence, him reading through a script for a possible future project, her digging through her purse for her Tide to go pen, and later holding a text conversation with Pam (she didn’t even mind Pam’s frequent and exuberant repetitions of “I KNEW IT, I TOTALLY KNEW IT”).

She could get used to this.


End file.
